My first serious sage problem after almost 2 years. Is there a log or debug mode?

[silkshadow]

Well after almost two years, I have encountered my first serious problem with Sage's core. Its a head scratcher. Is there a debug mode or log file with Sage that can tell me what is going on?

I am running Sage 4.1.3, the newest stable version. Java version 1.5 (update version 6) Its on Windows server 2003 with automatic windows updates on. Output with an MSI 6600gt. Two MCE-500's and a Powercolor theater 550 pro (PCI-e). Running on an AMD 64 3500+ and 2 gigs of ram. Nothing has changed on this rig since end of January/beginning feburary (don't remember exactly) when I swapped out a prolink playtv@7000 and put in the Powercolor ati theater pro 5500 pro. Its been running fine. Had a reboot last saturday. Last thing I did was add the favorite lineup stvi about a month ago.

Besides some minor things and adapting to upgrades in Sage, my Sage setup has been stable for almost two years. This problem happened totally out of the blue. I did my standard Saturday morning reboot (I find that rebooting this box every week keeps things running faster). I had breakfast then came back and pressed the recordedtv button which should've brought sage up and into the recordedtv menu. Nothing happened. I went to the console to bring Sage up manually and sage was dead. I ended task and tried again. It froze on "initilaizing service". I opened my sage service to see what was going on. I saw that it was stopped. I click start, and it started. Tried sage gui again, froze again. Went back to the service menu, it said started. I refreshed it and it said it was stopped. Checked my events viewer and saw that Sage service was "exiting unexpectedly". I played with it and discovered that sage service would start then stop, then start then stop, etc. I disabled the service and tried to just launch sage gui. It loads but then dies right before the main gui is supposed to come up.

Fast forward 8 hours later. I had given up on it, shut the box down and pulled the plug. Gave it all day to cool off while I went to play golf. I just brought the box back up and the same problem is still happening. Everything else on this box is working fine. I just installed Meedio TV on this box (I got a lisence during their Christmas sale) to test the tuners and they are all working fine.

What is going on? Any ideas? Is there a way to make Sage log its loading process? Should I uninstall and reinstall sage? Thanks!

[JUC]

have you added any media to your server lately? I wouldn't think it would crash sage servers but since i don't run it as a server i would not know. But i once had one corrupt .mp3 file that i imported into sage. It would stop and crash everytime it started. Since you said you haven't done anything to the setup this probably isn't it but i'm just throwing it out there. If you have added anything recently try removing all your import directories and see if that helps.
JUC

[silkshadow]

Thanks for the reply. Nope, I have not added anything to Sage on this box besides Sage's own recordings. On this computer I use Meedio to handle all the non-PVR media, so nothing gets imported into Sage. The last thing I recorded, as far as I can tell from time stamps, is a show on AXN (one of the stations here). I played it back using Zoom Player and it played fine. In a couple hours I am going to give up and reinstall Sage. Saturday night messing with Sage, sounds like fun !

[Opus4]

I've heard of a corrupt properties file causing strange things, so you could check to see if deleting sage.properties (after making a backup copy someplace) & its autobackup helps, but then you will have to reconfigure everything.

You can set the property debug_logging=TRUE (CAPS & all) to turn on debug logging.

- Andy

[silkshadow]

Thanks Opus! Wish I logged in last night. I would've liked to see what the problem was. Just so you know, I did search the manual, in Abobe, for debug and I didn't find anything. I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling Sage. That fixed the problem. Still not sure what caused it. One of the first things I did was try and let Sage rebuild the properties file but that didn't work. Thanks again!

[menace]

I had the same problem and downgraded java to 1.4.2 and the problem went away--not saying its for sure the java version since others have the latest and greatest and working fine. I also disabled updates for java--If it works--why would I need to update it? Just my experience.

[redman]

Hi Silk,
what I found was that using the tvxb, some of the channels (especially 18) were haveing show times, names and other junk in the sub-title field on the epgdata.xml

When Sage tries to play/record, etc a show with this type of data, the service will just stop. (plus other unrepeatable errors).

I added an "end:" parameter to Channel 18 of starhub, and this removed all crappy XML entries... no more errors.

I am travelling at the moment, but can post the "end" upadtes I used for tvxb whic solved all my sage crashing issues.

Cheers
chris